Finished Paper Mario N64 style in record time the other day.

Loved every moment of that damn game so much that it completely ruined any day between buying it on the Wii VC and completing it.

The hardness factor was spot on, it never became frustrating but was challenging enough that I had to at least keep one eye on it.

Good news for my health is that I am not enjoying the sequel Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door any way near as much.  They’ve tweaked the combat and I’m finding it a heck of a lot harder.  The dialogue seems a bit flabbier as well.

Today I went a bit lustful for retro nintendo action. The DS & DS Lite can play GBA (Game Boy Advance) games as well as their own. Well I completely missed out on the whole GBA period and it turns out some nice old nintendo games were released for it.

I’ve fancied playing through the early zelda games for a while and heres a perfect chance. On the GBA they released/ported the 1st one (Legend of Zelda… originally on the NES) the 2nd (Adventures of Link… NES) and the 3rd (Link to the Past… SNES), plus also one specifically for the GBA called the Minish Cap which was something like the 11th so there’s a bit of a jump there.

These games don’t seem to be available on either play.com nor amazon.co.uk nor any of the usual suspects dot com so I hit ebay and there seems to be enough copies going around for everyone to own them so yay! I bought them 4, along with Yoshi Island which is one of the Mario platformers I never played.

Unfortunately, unlike a bonefide GBA you cannot play Game Boy/Game Boy Color games on the DS, and nintendo haven’t (as far as I can tell) released the game boy zelda titles in a manor that can be played on a DS. If they released a game boy adaptor I could play all the way up to zelda 4…. and even more, if they released a port of Ocarina of Time to the DS (please please please please please) I could play all zelda’s up to … 9!

That surely would be enough zelda to understand the whole history of hyrule.

Apparently, the DS has become the fasting selling console of any kind in Japan and rightly so! I’ve become a total Nintendo whore since getting it, it’s the sort of thing you fall maddly in love with and end up carrying around with you all over just in case you can steel a few minutes to play. Even though I’m not a massive games fanatic… I can happily go months without any joystick action of any kind.. I’ve always had a soft spot for nintendo. The N.E.S passed me by, as it did most of us in the U.K for unfathomable reasons (sega did better here in them days… blechgh). Anypoop, ever since the SNES, with maro world, pilot wings, zelda (the one about time) and mart kart, all classic games nintendo have been my one and only, game console wise.

After the SNES they had the N64. Now, did anyone understand why and how that thing was 64-bit, did it need to address TBytes of memory? Did it have to calculate from extremely precise floating-points? Unless that thing had a double life as a data-centre I’ve no idea. Mario 64 was totally crush-worthy on that console, and zelda. But they were the only 2, so that was a little disappointing. And things got even worse with the Game Cube, which had a mario game I really didn’t take to at all, it seemed to have missing all the mario charm. Squirting water everywhere, what was that about?

I’m so happy then that Nintendo are back! Totally. Not only is the DS a tremendous success with the most enjoyable line of games I can remember, but also everyone is salivating over the prospect of the Wii. And Sony have a turkey on their hands! How awesome is that?

I got Mario Kart DS the other day and OMG. Can’t put that bastard thing down, I’ve already completed all the grand prix’s except the mirror one. I’m not terribly good against people on wi-fi though, but I’m getting there! Oh, my Mario Kart DS Friend Code is 1289-2449-0177. Shame no one reads this or I might get some racing offers.

Gabi, on my animal crossing game has given me a nickname, she’s now calling me “Super T”, I think we’re in love, and she’s still reminding me a lot of Monica, well except, Gabi keeps running around catching butterflies and I suspect Moni would frown upon that. I’ve also had my house extended but I have to wait until tomorrow to find out what it’s going to be like, I asked for a pink roof.

I finished New Mario this morning, easiest end of game boss ever lol! Weird thing is, you can complete it whilst not having found 2 out of the 8 of the worlds. But I’ve now managed to unlock them both, which was probably harder than completing it. Shit, I have so been playing that thing way too much haven’t I? My DS lite is so awesome

There’s still the bizarre talk from many directions of a possible Apple + Nintendo tie up. It’s so wishful thinking! Company wise I expect they would clash massively, they both are too much the jealously guarding secret types. Nintendo have always been extremely closed and very much like to be the loners, sitting in a corner playing with themselves, um. Some podcast suggested what could happen though is maybe Apple license some early nintendo games for inclusion in a future iPod. I dunno how early we’re talking, maybe as far back as NES. But that would still be super duper.

New Mario is sooo gooood. I feel like a child during the golden age of gaming again.

I would have been able to play it all day if it wasn’t for some stupidness. The game and the console arrived separately, they probably came from different warehouses or sompt. For most of the day I’ve had the ds lite but nothing to play on it. Turns out I had had the game all along, but nobody had bothered to check the post box! Silly huh? We all had presumed each other had checked and that there wasn’t any mail. As usual. Its pure laziness.

Oh but the game is just perfect, it plays exactly like the snes one that I had hoped for, the biggest change is more subtle animation on the characters, theres some really funny and cute movement from them. My favourite so far has been a fish, which does such an hilarious dash for you where it looks like it barely has enough strength to hulk along its giant jaw.

A scatterbrain entry just for kicks

At Five! I’m trying to avoid tomato based dishes but it’s tricky, it more or less halves what you can eat, especially from Italian cuisine. So occasionally I’ll allow myself just a bit as a treat. I’ve just had spaghetti and meat-balls. Already I can feel the tomato meanies rushing through my veins. Ugh.

At Four! I’ve ordered a Nintendo DS Lite. Oops. Ha ha. Buyers remorse and i haven’t even received it yet. Just ordered New Mario with it for now but it’ll be enough I’m sure! I absolutely adore the old 2D style mario games. I’ve probably mentioned before how mad I am about SNES Mario world. It’s pure charm.

At Three! I finally got around to packaging up my busted hard drive on wednesday. We cleared the loft out because sheffield is had a collect your unwanted stuff day, you could dump just about anything, like old bikes and chairs and shit outside the house and they came to collect it. Nice of them huh? Anyway, I found amongst the stuff in the loft a box and some polystyrene that was just perfect for packaging the hard drive exactly as hitachi demanded. Quite incredible though, the post office only dispatched it wednesday, to reach hitachi on thursday and yesterday (friday) I received an email that they have dispatched a new hard drive to me. I was damn impressed. Almost makes up for the cufuffle with the packaging.

At Two! I forgot to mention that a week or 2 ago I tried out Neooffice 2 for intel. I’m sure the people at Neooffice are nice chaps ‘n’ gals but I’m going to find this very difficult to word without sounding cruel and hateful. It’s just, I can’t help wondering if the Neooffice can possibly be proud of their product? The intention of Neooffice is to improve Openoffice and make it more mac-like. But, they’ve managed, once again to actually make it worse! It’s slower and more clumsy even than running Openoffice via X11. You can actually see it redrawing the window. Oh yeah, and the only thing as far as I can figure out that they’ve improved for mac-likeness is the menubar. The rest is the same! Even the open/save dialog is as it is in openoffice. If I worked for Neooffice I would demand that they bin the whole thing and attack the project from another angle. Something fundamental is wrong.

And straight in at number One! I’ve nothing else to say today really.